Best-paper awards;

Page 1

Eleven years ago our Best-Paper
Awards program was begun in the ex­pectation
of promoting wider interest
and greater effectiveness in speaking
and writing throughout the Firm.
The roster of winners this year fol­lows:
J. Carl Brooksby, principal, Phoenix,
won First Award of $750 for his paper
The Accountant's Responsibility With
Respect To Unaudited Financial State­ments.
In preparation of his paper, which
he presented at a meeting of the Ari­zona
Society of CPAs, Mr. Brooksby
interviewed a number of CPAs and
credit grantors to get first-hand infor­mation.
From this he concludes that
rendering unaudited statements is a
practice more prevalent in Arizona than
in most areas and that the situation will
not improve as long as it is generally
condoned. He found that many CPAs
make quite comprehensive reviews,
even though they eventually mark the
statements "unaudited" and disclaim an
opinion. The credit grantors inter­viewed
are quick to check whether
statements they receive are audited or
unaudited, yet they put more stock in
unaudited statements prepared by a
CPA than in those prepared by the com­pany.
Mr. Brooksby skillfully relates
these findings to applicable AICPA
pronouncements and suggests ways to
upgrade the CPAs' work. This paper
was subsequently published in The Ari­zona
CPA Quarterly in the May 1965
issue.
Ralph W. Sauber, MAS manager,
San Francisco, won Second Award of
$500 for his article The Quarterly Plan
Review. Mr. Sauber's paper explains
with case studies the need to keep busi­ness
plans for the future constantly up-to-
date. It uses exhibits to show how,
as each quarter of a year's plan is con­verted
to "actual," another quarter is
added. The method's greatest advan­tage
is that "everyone in the organiza­tion
becomes plan-conscious... Manag­ers
are relieved of an onerous, tedious,
once-a-year exercise and oriented to
planning ahead as a part of their daily
business lives." The article was first pre­sented
as a talk before the Finance
Planning Council of the American Man­agement
Association and was published
in Management Services magazine, No­vember-
December 1964 issue.
Hugh M. Eggan, principal, Wash­ington,
won Third Award of $300 for
his paper Recapture Provisions of the
Internal Revenue Code. Mr. Eggan
performs a useful service in analyzing
relevant Code sections, regulations, and
committee reports and correlates the
three different aspects of recapture with
specific transactions. Written with ad­mirable
precision and command of tech­nical
concepts and expression, his paper
helps the qualified reader to put into
perspective this new feature in Federal
income taxes. The paper was given in
June 1965 at the Virginia Conference
on Federal Taxation, University of Vir­ginia,
and is scheduled for publication
in the February 1966 issue of The Jour­nal
of Accountancy.
Jack L. Elliott, principal, won Fourth
Award of $200 for his paper Prepara­tion
of Cash-Flow Forecasts and Funds
Statements. Mr. Elliott outlines lucidly
the principles underlying the prepara-
1
tion of these forecasts and statements,
draws the distinction between them,
and shows their areas of usefulness in
modern corporate financial reporting.
This paper was presented before the
Jackson, Mississippi, Chapter of the Na­tional
Association of Accountants, was
awarded a Certificate of Merit by the
NAA, and was published in the July
1965 issue of the NAA Rulletin.
This year's increase in the number
and size of the awards expresses the
Firm's confidence that the Awards Pro­gram
is effective in increasing the
amount and quality of our professional
writing. It is heartening to note that
many who submit papers continue to
write, whether they become award-winners
or not, as do many who become
ineligible upon admission to the Firm
as partners or directors. They evidently
recognize that "the virtue lies in the
struggle, not the prize."
Whatever the motivation, the hard
task of writing gives a man new insight
into himself and his work. He learns to
watch for the gleam that signals a new
approach. He gains an ease in con­structing
an outline, learns how to sort
known features from those requiring
research, to adopt a point of view to­ward
his subject, to express thoughts on
his subject that have struck him in a
novel way, and to keep his thinking on
a sound technical track.
Growing recognition of the technical
paper as a means of self-development is
one of two primary values of the Awards
Program. Expressing tangibly the
Firm's appreciation of exceptional ef­fort
is the other.